The blood of the insane

2006/11/13 by Richard Noll · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #History #Medical emergency #Medicine #Mental Health and Psychiatry #Neurology and Historical Studies #Psychiatry #Psychology

paper · doi:10.1177/0957154x06059440

openalex publication_date 2006/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

The history of serological investigations of the blood of the insane is traced from the initial such study in 1854 by a solitary Scottish asylum physician, who counted the blood cells of his lunatic patients under a weak microscope, to the January 2005 announcement by an international team of geneticists of the development of a genomic blood test that can differentially diagnose schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The story of the first claim of the development of a blood test for madness in 1912--the Abderhalden defensive ferments reaction test--is related in detail. Studies of the blood of the insane have followed four general methodological paradigms: the corpuscular richness paradigm (1854); the metabolic paradigm (c. 1895); the immunoserodiagnostic paradigm (1906); and the medical genomics paradigm (2005).

Citations

• Styles of psychiatric practice, 1906-1925: clinical evaluations of the same patient by James Jackson Putnam, Adolph Meyer, August Hoch, Emil Kraepelin and Smith Ely Jelliffe
• The British reaction to dementia praecox 1893-1913. Part 1
• Historical review: Autointoxication and focal infection theories of dementia praecox
• The fraud of Abderhalden's enzymes
• Dementia praecox studies
• The American Reaction to Dementia Praecox, 1900
• Infectious insanities, surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes, dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 1

Cited by

• Kraepelin's `lost biological psychiatry'? Autointoxication, organotherapy and surgery for dementia praecox
• Dementia praecox [wikipedia]